That was the problem: Vin never thought. He never had to. He was protected. Immune. All he had to do was visualize a problem, and it went away with a great big smile and a can-do attitude. Yeah, right. Kalusians didn’t know how the rest of the galaxy worked.
Meanwhile, Aly was constantly stressed about what to say or how to stand, always trying to look polite and friendly and not even a little bit angry—so that maybe for one second people could forget about the uprisings. It was easier than trying to educate them, to explain how the Wraetans were just trying to defend their own land. It was like everyone on Kalu had amnesia. And sure, he knew Vin hadn’t meant it. But that didn’t change the fact that Vin didn’t get it. He never would.
On the far side of the Revolutionary, Aly stripped off his black uniform until he was down to his military-issued ribbed tank and boxer briefs. He suited up and slipped into the Tin Soldier, the Revolutionary’s exploratory pod. Dembos was the Wraetan moon, which meant that in a way, he was headed home—or near it. Near enough to get a look, anyway. He plotted a course for the station that would allow him a decent view of northern Wraeta, his birthplace.
Or what was left of it, at least.
About an hour out, following a slightly curved trajectory, he was able to make out little specks emerging from the black space to his right. Wraeta.
Way back when, Wraeta was just the fourth rock from the sun—not particularly pretty, not especially powerful, and only a little bit useful because of the elements mined from there. For centuries, Wraeta had maintained political neutrality. When Aly’s great-grandfather was still alive, Wraeta had even hosted the G-1K summit—which stood for the “Galaxy’s One Thousand.” It was a meeting at which one thousand of the galaxy’s most brilliant scientific minds spent months tinkering and negotiating. The scientists of the G-1K had produced the universe’s first cube right on his home planet. On a school trip when he was little, Aly had even gone to see a monument dedicated to the first successful cube installation.
Fast-forward another sixty years, and the thing that actually put Wraeta on the map was the fact that Kalu had bombed its capital to hell a year before the Urnew Treaty was signed. The damage radius was as far as it was wide. Not to mention all the dust and debris sent into the atmosphere, the lowered temperatures . . .
Aly had survived, obviously—they’d started the evacuation months ahead of time. But Wraeta was destroyed, uninhabitable, and seeing the rubble of the former planet gave him a weird, floaty feeling in his chest, like someone was messing with his personal gravity.
He slowed down the Tin Soldier so he could stare. The last time he’d been here he’d thought the same thing: crazy there’d been a bright, shining planet a decade ago. Now it was half a planet with a massive bombed-out crater on the north side. A lot of people thought Wraeta had it coming because they’d thrown in with Fontis instead of staying neutral. But with Fontisian missionaries running around the planet, Fontisian money infusing its economy, it didn’t seem to Aly like they’d had a choice.
There were free-floating rocks that used to be pieces of the planet, naturally charged. It made them easy to corral within a fixed space, inside a massive electromagnetic net that prevented them from floating light-years apart. Thousands of tiny steel plaques reflected the lights of his pod. They’d been brought by mourners and released within the net, as mementos of the ones who were lost on the battlefields when Kalu invaded, or during the passage, or when they had refused to evacuate their homes.
Aly had released his own plaque two years ago, during his first visit. He scanned for the moment on his cube now, down in the knotted architecture of his memory. He knew many folks kept their cube spick-and-span and were able to find anything anytime—and he wished he were that guy. But too much time had gone by, too many memories accumulated, none of them sorted.
It took him a couple of minutes. His vision clouded and his eyes ached during the search: It was like trying to find one single grain in a great big silo. But finally he located the memory file: two years ago, thinking of his mom and his sister as he ejected the plaque into space.
Now the great mass of rocks swayed, like a phantom hand was moving them.
And in the corner of his eye: a ghost, hurtling past the rocks of Wraeta. Aly followed it, or tried to, but he was still learning how to drive the Tin Soldier. The thing he’d seen—whatever it was—wove in and out of his vision, and there on the side he swore he saw it: the royal seal.
Impossible.
His heartbeat quickened. It was the royal seal, he was sure of it, which meant it was an escape pod from the royal ship. The Princess had been confirmed dead, but what if she had survived? What if she escaped?